Decluttering Arkham Horror

While working on something totally unrelated (incidentally, I was reviewing the rules of my “Chieftains of Catan” variant), I observed that there were eleven possible results for the roll of 2d6, and my brain went, “huh-duh?”

There are eleven unstable locations in the Arkham Horror basic game, which means that if one wished to eliminate the Mythos deck from the game, all one would need to do is assign each of the unstable locations to a die result:

As I recall, the two least likely locations to spawn a gate are the Science Building and Historical Society, followed by Hibb’s Roadhouse and the Silver Twilight Lodge. I think the Graveyard, the Black Cave, and the Unnameable were tied.

The Woods, Independence Square, the Witch House, and the Unvisited Isle are the most common sites for gates.

If you’re worried about monster movement, I thought of that too — “simple” shapes like the circle, triangle, and square move on results of five or less. “Pointy” shapes such as the diamond, hexagon, and star move on rolls of nine or more.

“Transition” shapes, like the crescent, plus, and slash move on the six-seven-eight. Which direction do they move? Well if you roll evens, the monsters move on the “white” arrow, and if you roll odds they move on the “black” arrow.

As for Clue tokens, I haven’t thought of a good refresher mechanic quite yet, but I have a feeling that each time a gate opens, a Clue token should appear at each unstable location where there is neither an open gate nor an investigator.

I investigated the original Arkham Horror a bit, but I didn’t get into the rules — I couldn’t find a copy of the document — and I suspected that dice were used to determine whether gates opened and monsters appeared. I see from the picture that must be what the chart in the bottom-left corner must be for. :)

this doesn’t take into account the ongoing effects that Mythos cards have though. Also it might end up being even worse to keep track of all the details. The thing that the clutter in Arkham Horror does is keep track of a lot of different things that might get lost when trying to simplify them like this.
Although I guess it could be done, have you looked at the original version of Arkham Horror? That one had far simpler mechanics.

I’ve considered some of the ongoing effects of Mythos cards, such as environments and rumors, but those add to the “clutter” as well. The main effects of Mythos cards are first, to open a new gate or trigger a monster surge, to spawn a monster or add to the outskirts, and add clue tokens.

There are so many additional effects Mythos cards can have — spawn extra monsters, remove monsters from specific locations, close locations, create special events, and so forth — it seems like there are a lot of add-ons and expansions to the game that do just as well.